


and your bird can sing

by chronique



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1930s, Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon Compliant, Captain America: The First Avenger, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, Fluff, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Light Angst, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, World War II, and bucky is just trying to survive, steve is an angry dandelion puff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24174097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronique/pseuds/chronique
Summary: Steve never takes, even if it’s a mercy. Bucky was raised only to give.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	and your bird can sing

It’s summer and Steve draws him like a bird stretched across the floor. 

Bucky is eighteen and though he does everything these days for a couple of bucks, he lets Steve draw him for free. Steve offers him money every time. He’s skeletal and polite and Bucky could never accept. 

It makes Steve angry. Steve is always angry. Now, in the dark room, Bucky looks up from where he’s lying and sees white knuckles wild against paper. The split of graphite, black rings that touch every corner of skin. Steve brings his legs up, curls his toes, swings them back down. He spits. He’s sick. His own noises make him angry.

“Bring your head up, Buck,” Steve says.

Bucky lifts his head. Steve is not looking at him. They rarely talk when Steve draws. His apartment has naked, thin walls, and if they talk loudly everyone will hear. In the morning someone will steal their groceries, their few plants, their newspapers. So Bucky leaves it to tiny remarks about the docks or dancing and Steve replies if he has the patience. 

“Higher, Buck.”

Steve looks up from his sketchbook.

Bucky gazes at him, then to the window. The room is hot and outside Brooklyn swells furious and sometimes loving. The moon hangs thin and shadowy. A crowd of schoolboys stumble drunk into a crosswalk. Bucky laughs. He doesn’t remember why.

Steve is still looking at him. It’s never quiet but in the seconds before Steve talks again they both become terrible, silent creatures. A blue bird tilting its head on an empty tree, questioning, questioning. Animals without teeth, animals that bow when they kill. He’s all dirt, could pull himself out of his own muscle. 

“Higher.”

Bucky closes his eyes and reopens them. Steve leans into his sketchbook. 

“Okay,” Bucky murmurs. “Okay.”

Bucky wonders if Steve is angry because he knows in this story he is paper and bone and no muscle — or because he knows in this story he can’t end in summer.

  
  


***

What he never does for free is crate loading. He’s at the docks ten hours everyday, no gloves and lots of smokes. It’s still dark when he walks down, unlatching the watch from his wrist and pocketing it because it’s safer there. He hops over a fence at the back end of the docks and ducks beneath the construction. On the rusted spires of metal, the workers glare down at him.

“Morning, boys!” Bucky waves.

One man kicks a pale of paint residue at him and Bucky scampers off, grinning. He shakes out his hair, looks back, and tosses the man a pack of cigarettes. There’s a tide of good-natured laughter.

“Mornin’.” 

Bucky climbs the next fence and heads to the water. He’s there working when the sun starts to crack and everyone smells like new smoke. Bucky unloads crates, dozes on a stack of different crates for a minute, then reloads the first set of crates somewhere else. 

When he later remembers the docks it’s painted gray. Gray, dry hands and boys with gray up to their necks. Tired gray. 

The day grows silvery bright. A boat creeps toward where Bucky’s breathing and resting his cheek on a wood box, the only thing that’s not hot. It’s Tuesday. There's a little boat that comes by every Tuesday around noon and idles by Bucky’s station. Bucky straightens, scrubs his cheek and watches the little boat. It groans wet and heavy, probably leaking gas. _Bucky once watched a woman wade into this water and when she crawled out she was a body of oil. A bird tried to land on her, she was so shiny._ Now, the same man that comes by every Tuesday around noon steps out and catches himself as he nearly slips on the docks. He adjusts his cap. He thinks he’s a sailor. Bucky thinks in another story he might be. 

His name is Greg and he reaches out to Bucky. Bucky grins and it rips the corners of his mouth. 

“Sorry, pal,” he shakes his cigarette pack, bites down,“last one.”

Greg frowns and Bucky shoulders past him. It’s not really his last, and Bucky will give him a smoke later. 

“Heya, sailor,” Bucky hears Phil, another dock worker, saunter up to Greg. “Smokin’ ain’t good for a man like you.”

“What?”

Greg is uptight and clean. Bucky smiles to himself as Phil teases Greg and the others join, only their faces white. Bucky draws the rope of the little boat to his chest, pulls and ties it down. Today the crate he heaves from the little boat is on fire. Bucky’s too tangled up in smoke to realize before it bursts in his arms and he leaps back. Phil is shouting behind him. Bucky brings his hands to his eyes and thinks they have disappeared. 

“Jesus, Buck.”

Bucky’s hands are puffed gibbous and peeling. _Liquefaction._ The word slinks from a cobwebbed end Bucky hasn’t heard from in a while; science class and cat-eyed glasses. He looks at his hands, the red curling up his arms. Skin liquefaction. Skin peeling.

“What happened?” Steve pulls him toward the mattress, sits him down, and rushes into the kitchen.

Bucky keeps staring at his hands as if he can’t seem to place what’s wrong. Steve returns with a bowl and cream and bottles. White gauze and torn sheets. 

Bucky peers up at him. “They burned.”

“You don’t say,” Steve isn’t exactly scorning.

He’s still angry, his shoulders low and narrow. That incessant clench. Bucky raises his hand and moves to smooth it on his left shoulder. He’s drifting. Steve grabs it and cuts him a long look. He has no legs. Bucky thinks he might be a bird shot mid-flight. 

“Just,” Steve gathers his wrists and lays them gently over the bowl, “let me.”

Gathers him like he’s trying to hold all his words that are drifting with him. 

Steve pours the alcohol over his hands and Bucky howls and Steve nudges him because Bucky is smiling. Bucky has no hands. More alcohol. A cotton ball and a damp thumb. Cool cream and he hums. Steve, a figure pushed in front of the concrete room. Hollow inner arms and fingers made of graphite and rage. Exploding birds.

Steve wraps his hands and Bucky smiles for hours.

***

_Winnifred Barnes held him close once and said his gift was making people smile._

_All he had to do was hang around long enough._

***

In summer Steve draws him pale and gleaming like a forgotten moon.

The window is open and it’s night and the fire escape is littered with glass and cigarette packs. Steve tells him not to look at the fire escape. Not think about his work or his feet that are so eagerly asleep — and he’s jealous that his feet can sleep before he can. Think of the art and the anemic artist hunched on the mattress. 

Steve breaks three pencils. 

When it’s over and Bucky digs his head into his arm, Steve turns on the light. Bucky stands up and sways. Puts his hand on the paper. 

He wants to see the finished picture but Steve closes his sketchbook. _When it’s ready. I’ve barely even started._

Bucky wants to ask, _how did_ _you_ _start?_

Steve turns off the light.

The night window, the healing flesh creeping lazily over his wrists. The night window, the pale, pale body.

***

He goes dancing with a girl named Sophie. It’s fall and it will be the last night of Harlem dances before it gets too cold. 

At the door of his apartment, Bucky puts on his watch and kisses it. Steve is scowling at him from across the room. He has his coat on but refuses to move.

“Just tonight, come one,” Bucky mutters and turns to Steve. Steve doesn’t answer. Bucky sighs. “Why?” Steve looks pallid and wild. “You rather get beat up? That it?”

“He stole Beth’s necklace! I’m not goin’ dancin’.”

“You think it’s gonna do any good — you going for her?” He means it but this isn’t the moment where he’s superior. “Steve.” 

Steve stares at him and Bucky feels small for the first time in a while. “He’s a bully,” Steve sounds nearly grave, “and you should know what’s right.”

Bucky’s furious because Steve is not selfish but it would be easier to say that he is. He’s going dancing and Steve’s walking out angry and alone to confront a man twice his size. 

“Then I’ll go with you,” Bucky says.

“No. Enjoy your night.” 

Bucky’s only half remembering how spiteful Steve can be.

_Steve never takes, even if it’s a mercy. Bucky was raised only to give._

He looks at his watch and opens the door, says, “be careful.”

Sophie doesn’t ever sleep, Bucky guesses. But she’s flying around the Savoy Ballroom and her mouth is a wide, endless line. She’s seventeen and doesn’t move neatly, and Bucky likes that. He’s used to delicate skin. Soot skin. 

“Can’t believe you were named after the worst President in history!” He wasn’t, not really. “Hey! Chick Webb’s gonna head a band here soon!” Sophie says as she swings by him.

Bucky pulls her back, grins. “Who?”

“He’s a jazz drummer,” her eyes are spectral, “but I heard he’ll be band leader.”

“Have to come back and see him then.”

Sophie tips her head back and glows. “I love him! I just love him.”

He wants to hold her until she is golden.

They fall outside deep in the night and nothing is dark.

“Let’s stay here until all the lights go off,” Sophie’s tugging him to a bench by the street.

Bucky sits with her. “I don’t think they ever turn off.”

“I think they do.” She’s smiling, then says, “My father told me stories about the war of the currents when I was younger. I’d like to do something with electricity. Light bulbs or radios.”

Bucky might say, _please don’t get yourself hurt._

“My father was in Ireland during the war of the currents.” He doesn’t know why he chooses to say this. 

Sophie nods and Bucky sees himself afraid. He pulls out a pack of smokes and lights one and Sophie plucks it from his lips. She’s an echo of something older, a silhouette drowning softly. Bucky relaxes a bit.

“What do you want to do?” She asks, and when he shrugs she smokes and smokes. “Don’t resent what’s possible.”

Above, the last light winks out.

***

He’s smart and easily endearing. He should have done great things. 

Listening to the dying sounds of Brooklyn at night, breaking leaves, Bucky knows that the bitter pinch below his ribs is because he still could. He presses his fingers into each other to remind himself, taunt himself, that he still can. He sometimes runs across his old school field and waits until he trips. He practices arithmetic and scratches the numbers until they fail him. 

He’s hung around for so long. 

Bucky can see himself curving time and rising from this dirt. 

A precise sequence of strings created only from beginnings. A baseball glove that never touches yellowed grass. Three happy sisters. Curly hair and hands that don’t bury. A clean face.

The night gives him a hundred different faces and he presses his nose into the mildewed pillow to keep him from choosing even one.

*** 

Bucky doesn’t remember that winter. 

***

In spring he goes home to celebrate his oldest sister’s birthday. He spends all his leftover money on her gift because he knows Steve expects him to. He’s (mostly) honest. He takes care of his family. He buys his sisters nice presents. He insists on his goodness. 

“Who’s this?” Bucky kneels down and the dog lunges at him, tail wagging.

“Archie.”

“Hello, Archie.” He runs his finger along the closed skin where an eye should be. “You’re very pretty.”

“He’s a boy.” Becca slants by the door, too thin, and frowns.

Bucky leans in conspiratorially and lightly flicks the dog’s nose. “She’s just jealous.” He stands back up and waits until she concedes a smile. “Happy birthday.”

He follows her inside and as she leads him to the back, shouting, “Bucky’s here!” all he can think of is how mangled the house appears. The stubbly paint and the uneven pictures. It’s bruised and old and he remembers it as charming. He wants to move them out of here. He’s just waiting until he earns enough.

Becca slides open the screen door at the back. There’s a little table with some decorations and a cake. He hugs his two younger sisters, then his mother.

“Where’s Steve?” Winnifred asks.

“Takin’ care of his Ma.” He turns to Becca who’s setting out plates. “He says happy birthday, wish he could be here.”

She nods, and Winnifred shakes her head. “Poor boy. I hope Sarah’s okay.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything. 

They sing happy birthday and in Brooklyn it’s a pretty day. He talks about the docks and how he burned his hands, how funny it was. His two younger sisters gasp and touch the skin there. Becca grins, mildly amused. He hugs them several times. Becca sends him an unconvinced look as they watch Archie fling a stick across the yard.

She pokes him. “What about the man at the radio repair shop? Arnold …”

“Fraser.”

“Yes. Did you hear from him about the job? I know his daughter, I could — ”

“No,” Bucky breathes out, gestures reassuringly to his healed hands, then the house, “too far anyways.”

Before Becca can say anything more, Archie crashes into the screen door, happily and dazedly scrambles up. 

“We rescued him!” his youngest sister declares.

“Saints, all of you.”

His youngest sister is shoving him, snickering, his mother shaking her head again. He doesn’t miss Becca’s sad smile. Bucky looks at wobbly Archie gnawing at a stick. Even animals become deformed out here.

***

It’s still spring. The docks swell hot and Bucky’s more careful about the crates he picks up, always scans them over first. Even wears gloves sometimes. Jumps the fences. Packs of smokes like he’s feeding them to every worker there. Above, birds watch. 

When the sun begins to flicker low and they’re all still working, moving through a collapsing dance, they sing. Bucky doesn’t really pay attention to the words, doesn’t really know them, but follows the rhythm. It’s meant to orchestrate them. And they are rows of bodies, rhyming, knees bent, arms reaching down and back up. To anyone watching from afar, just torsos. 

The light’s on in Bucky’s apartment when he gets home that night. Steve has pulled his mattress up against the window, a book unopened on his chest. 

“No drawing?” Bucky teases, collecting the watch from his pocket and thoughtfully laying it out on his dresser. Keys, change, a mint.

“Not tonight.”

Steve is the shadow that visits Bucky’s apartment, silent and slight. Bucky doesn’t mind. 

“Aw, was looking forward to it,” he grins, turning to Steve and catching the purple shine by his right eye, “but I see you’ve been busy.”

“I’m takin’ care of her.”

“Would help if you got a job.”

“It’s no different than what you do for your family.”

“Yeah. But I got a job.” Bucky says and Steve is quiet. “Wanna tell me what happened?” He moves to get the alcohol.

Steve waves it off. “You should save it.”

Bucky pauses, shrugs. “Sure.”

Steve speaks slowly, assuredly, like he’s always done. “Ma’s gettin’ sicker, y’know, and they wouldn’t give me her medicine so I talked to someone and someone else and went down to Hell’s Kitchen —” 

“What?” Bucky stills. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I know, but —”

“No. What? No, you _think_ you know.” Bucky spits and he’s bitter. “I can buy you the medicine. Don’t be stupid.”

“You’re not buying me the medicine. And I wasn’t being stupid.”

“Right. ‘Cause you were doing what you thought was right,” he has to stop himself from raising his voice, from pacing. He grabs at his hair and breathes into his arm. “Please, Steve. _Please._ My father.”

“I know.”

“Tell me you won’t go again.” Steve’s gaze is heavy, and Bucky sighs. “Why? No, don’t answer that. You go out alone, you get hurt, you think you know. So you keep going out and you get hurt!”

“Buck, calm down.”

“But I’m here and I’ve stuck around and I can’t —” Steve is looking at him. Bucky presses his teeth together, sobers. He’s all dirt. “I’m not always going to be here.” 

“Bucky.” Steve is sullen. 

“You need a job.”

“I’m tryin’.”

“Get one.”

“I’m tryin’.”

“Jeez — Steve, I need to sleep.”

***

The next summer they want to go to Coney Island and end up at Rockaway Beach.

The park, the boardwalk, the beach, the water, pushed up in slices against each other. Bucky charms, spends three dollars trying to win a stuffed bear for a girl named Dolores, charms more. People move in crowds everywhere. Bucky feels like washed out colour, perfectly worn. A bit tattered. He’s tired, always tired, but comfortable. Then he’s swimming, calling out to Steve every once in a while. He knows Steve won’t join him, ribs biting his skin, but he likes to give a running commentary. 

“Found a shell! No — it’s a crab. Steve, found a crab! Julie knows what kind it is … horseshoe! Horseshoe crab. Lovely colour. It has so many legs. Look at that. A nose? Julie said it’s a horn. Steve? Steve? Do you want to draw this?”

Steve glances up from his book, hands in the white sand. Hands tunnelling, searching, ceaseless. After a moment, he raises one. Bucky grins and wades out of the water, presses the crab to Steve’s palm. Steve is indulging him. Bucky turns and runs back into the water. 

He finds six more crabs and Steve pretends to luxuriate in his new collection.

They somehow manage to spend their train money on hotdogs. 

“C’mon,” Bucky spins and pulls Steve along. 

It’s night but the lights dot orange and green, and they’re winding through a sky of faces. Steve is cradling the crabs in his arms. 

“Wait.” He walks toward the last pool of sand and releases them. “Alright.”

They wander into the street. Bucky spots a freezer truck idling by the corner, and they climb onto the back. Steve is trying to keep him silent, engine low beneath them, and Bucky keeps laughing. 

Steve elbows him. “Buck!”

Bucky yelps, “Yeah, yeah. Sorry.” They watch Rockaway Beach become miniature, and Bucky whispers, “So did you draw them?”

“No.” Steve is hiding a smile.

“Did you draw me?” 

Bucky looks at Steve and there’s a sudden, encroaching weight. 

“You weren’t still enough. Have to be unmoving.”

He can feel his eyes roaming and skittish, body quiet. “That’s what I feel like.”

“What?”

“That’s what I feel like.” 

_Unmoving._ His head burrows into itself. He thinks of the gray docks, a scattered moon, Sophie and how she left, where he should be right now. He’s crashing. Steve shuffles until his shoulder is rushed against his own. 

“Okay,” Steve says, hands white. “Okay.”

In memory, he repeats it.

***

Steve stitches himself a new sketchbook in the fall. Bucky tries to find him a job, tries to keep his job, runs around Brooklyn, tired, awake. Whenever he’s home, during those few sweet hours, he sleeps. He barely notices Steve coming by less and less until he wakes up one day and realizes he hasn’t seen him in three weeks. 

And then Steve’s at the door of his apartment. And Steve is angry. It’s not obvious, anger sliding just beneath his skin. He’s always angry. Bucky lets him draw him on the floor. Then Steve leaves.

A week later he spies Steve hauling a pyramid of cardboard boxes from an alley. He drops one, trips, picks it up, drops another. Bucky walks over and lifts a fallen box. 

“She’s dead,” Steve says.

Bucky gazes at the boxes. “I’m sorry.”

He walks with him back to Sarah Rogers’ apartment. Now Steve’s. He offers to help gather her things. Says Steve can stay at his place. Steve declines politely and Bucky insists and Steve pats his arm. Bucky waits on the fire escape where it smells rotten until all the boxes are inside.

_He wants to help. He wants to be somewhere else._

Steve slumps by the door, takes a slow breath then immediately straightens. “There’s a lot of death.” Bucky watches him, and Steve watches back. “Thanks for being here.”

Bucky's sisters send Steve flowers. A couple days later, on the fire escape in a crib of leaves, Bucky watches as Steve unstitches his notebook to the bone.

***

Now Steve understands death. Bucky feels guilty because he wants Steve to be less reckless with his health. 

Now Steve knows there are consequences. Bucky feels guilty because he’s always known; he grew up playing in a graveyard.

***

No winter. 

***

_He looks up and sees a blue bird on an empty branch. It watches him, polished and scrutinizing. Questioning, questioning._

_He’s hung around and now seasons grow misshapen._

***

He’s in summer. He’s swimming in heat and comes to the surface with wings. Black graphite and straw hair. In his apartment it’s dusty, barely home, and Bucky thinks if he saves enough he can buy nice things and maybe sleep.

Fall.

Spring.

Summer. He likes to fool himself into thinking he could settle for this.

When he gets the chance, he enlists and waits desperately for England.

***

He’s in winter, twelve years old, and people are saying his father has died of Typhoid fever. Bucky sits in a big moldy chair and his mother is telling him to lie. _He wasn’t an Irish immigrant_. Bucky looks down at the watch loose on his wrist and the fingerprint there. Looks up. In the dark cavity of his mother’s mouth he sees his father hit with a crowbar and draped red in the snow.

***

As he falls, he’s seasons. 

Bucky recalls moments in temperature and changing clothes. A line of possibilities that rapidly condense and loop around. Ellipses life.

And Bucky was wrong. Steve is invariable circles of summer. Nevermind the shield, the height. He’s Rockaway sand and paper. Bucky remembers him, even when he can’t, as the angry, righteous teeth of Brooklyn. 

In Bucky’s story, it’s he who can’t end in summer.

He drops from the train surrounded by ice and he’s one of those drawings again: stretched through air like a bird. _Okay_ , he hears himself thinking. _Okay._

***

_When he is eight Bucky’s father buys him a bird. George Barnes swaths the cage in a soft blanket and carries it gently indoors. Becca is still a baby, and Bucky is playing with her on the floor in the kitchen. Winnifred dances around them._

_“James,” he whispers as she smacks him, giggling, with a pot. “James.”_

_The pot clangs and cartwheels across the tiles. “B-bucky!” She’s clapping her tiny hands._

_He smiles and gives her the pot so she can smack him again. She has no real toys._

_From the door, “Here.”_

_Bucky unfurls from the floor and his father bends down, extending the blanketed cage. Bucky looks up at him, carefully slides the cover off. Inside the web of wires, a blue bird clings to a wooden swing. A coiled speck of soft colour, and Bucky wonders if it was scared and pitching in the darkness before. Tap tap tap, he wonders if it’s tilting its head._

_“Oh,” he says, because it’s so small it seems a bit impossible._

_“Yours,” his father says._

_A twitching smile. Bucky was raised only to give._

_The bird is flapping wildly in its cage when he shows it to Steve. They’re on Bucky’s crumbling porch, midday Saturday — which means it’s as loud as ever, all shunting cars and flashing lights. Steve is peering at the bird from beneath shaggy bangs. He raises a single finger and tries to trace its darting movements._

_“I don’t think it likes this,” Steve murmurs._

_Bucky pouts and curls his hand around the wires. “Doesn’t like what?”_

_“Being stuck.”_

_They watch the bird. It starts to make noises that sound nearly like a song. Sarah Rogers, with her thin blonde hair and pearly skin, comes walking by with several cartons of eggs and beckons Steve over. Before he runs off, Bucky yanks his skinny arm._

_“Punk.”_

_“Jerk.”_

_Steve is too good already._

_His father says, take care of it, it has a short life._

_His father says, it doesn’t know how to stay.  
_

_Past the docks and the tired dock workers, near the bridge, there’s an abandoned wine cellar, now used as newspaper storage. Bucky follows Steve the next day, Sunday, crouches and slips into the darkness. The cellar’s gills, slight openings for narrow bodies. They crawl along the cement until Steve stops and points to one of the arching walls. Bucky reads the writing and laughs. Steve is not angry._

_They spend the night laughing and roaming along the cellar, the thrilling notions of their futures. They’ll go so far, it’s dizzying how sure they are. Steve says something about the bird and a story and how quiet it is down here. They laugh more, turn to singing, sing at the writing on the wall:_

_“He remaineth a fool his whole life long.”_

_So one evening, in the cellar, they open the cage and set the bird free. It finds the opening like a moth to something bright and hot. It leaves like blue cotton over the gray, gray water._

_Steve is smiling longingly. “I’d like to draw a bird.”_

_It won’t make it through the season._

**Author's Note:**

> the walls in the hidden wine cellars beneath the brooklyn bridge do have some quotes etched into them. it's uncertain whether "he remaineth a fool his whole life long" was originally written by martin luther or johann heinrich voss, a german poet. 
> 
> i thought it fit pretty well, in a tragic, tragic way.


End file.
